What do you do when your policy over the years has turned out to be a dud? You try to sell a continuation of that policy as something "new". New plans. New personnel. And you quickly dismiss the failures of the last four years (explicitly or implicitly). Witness these examples (excerpts, emp add).

In Iraq, American soldiers are finally beginning the hard job of establishing a measure of peace, security and order in critical sections of Baghdad ...

... they've embarked on these operations with the expectation that reinforcements will soon be on the way: the more than 20,000 troops President Bush has ordered to Iraq and the new commander he has appointed to fight the insurgency as it has not been fought since the war began.

It’s all totally irresponsible. It’s just unbelievable. The president is sending over a new commander, he’s sending over troops, and the Democratic Congress, in a pseudo-binding way or non-binding way, is saying, ‘It won’t work.'

Of course, all of those keyboard commandos don't understand the difference between "strategy", "operations", and "tactics".

The strategy of the escalation is unchanged. The tactics of the escalation have been tried before, now they're being tried again. Using a few more troops represents an insignificant operational difference.

Look through military history. When an attack failed, did the generals do the same thing with a few more troops? Was Dieppe followed up with another small commando raid? No, it was Overlord, a massive operation. Operation Battleaxe in the Libyan desert was followed by a much larger operation, Operation Crusader, which succeeded (briefly). Montgomery eventually followed up with his El Alamein operations, which was another order of magnitude larger. That battle finally drove Rommel out of the desert.

The surge is a red herring. The real change is that now U.S. troops have been given the green light to start killing Iranian agents. Previously, we had been catching them, interrogating them, and releasing them. The change in strategy is that now we are deliberately singling them out and killing them.